Get ready for LIGHTING 2.0

LUX Magazine reported how the next generation of lighting will change everything – yes, everything

You don’t need a long memory to recall that the initial promise of LEDs was for more efficient lighting. The initial efficiency bar wasn’t that hard to reach – many homes and more than a few businesses still employing traditional incandescent or halogen lamps, which only convert about 5-10 per cent of the energy they consume into light.

LEDs 1.0

But unfortunately, early examples of LED lighting struggled to deliver the total lumen output required to replace a traditional incandescent lamp in the GLS or PAR form factor. As a result the LED lighting industry set its sights on the commercial lighting space, where the larger form factors such as downlights and troffers offered an opportunity to deliver enough lumens using LEDs. Thus was born ‘LEDs 1.0’.

The by-product of this focus on commercial applications was that LED lighting found itself competing not with bulbs that produced 10-20lm/W, but with more efficient fluorescent and HID sources with system efficiencies of more like 40-100lm/W.

And whereas halogen was considered to be the gold standard in terms of light quality, making not more natural light.

As ‘warm’ white LEDs continued their technical progress, light output eventually reached a tipping point, which opened the door to competing for more compact form factors, including smaller downlights, and other luminaires that were never aesthetically amenable to fluorescents or CFLs. Those form factors were continuing to be served by halogen or improved-CRI metal halides. While this new generation of LEDs could deliver the required amount of light, they found themselves facing, for the first time, the challenge of delivering higher quality light. Instead of just focusing on efficiency, the LED industry added quality of light to its to-do list.

LEDs 2.0

The result, in recent years, has been a whole new generation of LEDs that deliver efficacy higher than any of the incumbent technologies, as well as quality of light that meets or exceeds those incumbents in virtually all lighting scenarios. This is LEDs 2.0.

Solutions that offer better quality of light come with a higher upfront cost than the incumbents, but the benefits of vastly improved efficiency, lower maintenance and increasing flexibility has begun to spur wider adoption wherever quality of light matters.

The addition of mandates and incentives, including increasingly broad incandescent bulb bans, as well as price decreases, has driven the adoption rate for luminaires and lamps enabled by LEDs 2.0.

Lighting 2.0

But that’s not the end of the story. More natural and controllable light is just the first step in bringing us to a whole new era of lighting; which Xicato CEO Menko Deroos has called ‘Lighting 2.0’.

Lighting 2.0 is lighting that communicates and interacts with both the environment around it, and the users that it serves. If history provides us with an accurate model, this revolution will happen in what seems like a blink of the eye compared to the pace of the technologies that led to it.

A parallel can be seen in mobile communications. For many decades, telephones were analogue, wired devices that served a single function. At some point, the technology moved from analogue to digital, providing new functionality such as call waiting and caller ID, and wireless technology ‘cut the cord’, but still it merely mimicked the features of our landlines. The real revolution came about when digital wireless telephony was combined with high-speed wireless data access to tap into the internet.

What resulted was not just a better telephone; it was a smartphone that enabled everything from web access to real-time navigation and traffic data, messaging and gaming. The wireless phone had become our gateway to connect to, and interact with, everything, and we began to tap into the Internet of Things.

Lighting 2.0 will be making this same move from its traditional role as a utility to a fully connected application. We’ve already seen commercial examples of connected lighting in which users apply smartphone apps to connect to their home lighting systems locally, as well as remotely, controlling colour or brightness, as well as creating fun visual effects or getting their lights to turn on or off.

Novel Energy Lighting has a wide range of the latest technology LED lighting. It caters to commercial clients with sophisticated and elegant lights. The products sold here include Philips CorePro LED GLS bulbs and Philips Master LED GU10 spots. These and similar ones are natural and controllable lights made for the new era of lighting.